... Alina, co founder & CEO of Round Funded. We re building Round Funded

... Product Hunt community, I m building XI Fantasy Leagues , a free-to-play fantasy cricket and football platform where users build squads, choose Captain and Vice-Captain, compete on leaderboards, and win sponsor-funded rewards. The idea is simple: users pay nothing. No entry fees, no deposits, no staking, and no wagering. Players participate in skill-based fantasy contests, while rewards are funded

... most important and challenging experiences you ll have as a founder is fundraising. I pitched VCs across London and San Francisco. Some spent 15 seconds on my deck. Some took the call just to diligence a competitor. One told me to ask for more money. Oh, and I found out your pitch is probably being recorded and run through AI. This is the high-impact version of all of those lessons to save you time, energy, and emotional damage. Please ... ... pitch. A lot of founders treat the first call like a performance. It s also discovery. Understand the game you re playing VC is a game of big bets. They are looking for outliers. Companies that can return the fund

... clients did, but many get stuck because they don t have the institutional capital that allows them to develop and scale fearlessly. Things like: sophisticated financial models credible business plans investor-ready decks / memos or access to the right funding channels The data backs it up: most startups never even apply for funding

... years ago, getting a VC check was the ultimate shortcut. The fastest way to scale. The signal that you'd "made it." But with AI is a little bit different. Global VC funding declined 30% in Q1 2024 . One of the lowest quarters since 2018. And bootstrapped startups are quietly catching up. Recent data shows bootstrapped businesses are growing as fast as VC-backed startups, while spending only about one-quarter as much on customer acquisition. Meanwhile, AI is changing ... ... slower compounding (most of the time), more constraints on bets, less ability to brute-force distribution. Beyond "pressure", VC is forced ambition, access to unfair advantages, and sometimes necessary for category leadership. So in the end it not freedom vs

... Today's Product Hunt lineup genuinely surprised me in the best way. TL;DR: As @aaronoleary said   one or more companies launching today will get a YC interview and potentially funding. As I was browsing through some of those who didn't apply [because we can see it in the dashboard], I kept wondering why didn't they? I've always come from a bootstrapped background, because: I saw it as a great deal of freedom in direction ... ... hope. There are significant costs tied to things like infrastructure, compliance frameworks, insurance, and generally building something that companies can trust at scale. And our first company simply doesn t generate enough cash to comfortably fund

... Imagine that you are about to join a startup (before raising funds) as a part-time employee. You are paid for work (compensation is like in any existing, well-established company in the industry, but you do not have regular employee benefits covering 401 plan, no equity, no health care plan, HO equipment fee, etc.) You hope that after raising funds

... Validate Demand, Pre-Sell Before Production, and Fund Inventory Through Pre-Orders By Anas Alshanti INTRODUCTION You don t need investors, warehouses, or luck you need proof. Every great product launch starts with one thing: validation. Too many creators build before they test, produce before they sell, and guess before they know. This playbook is your roadmap to launch smarter to turn ideas into funded

... only build mobile apps. Soon hitting 50 new signups daily. All these signups came with massive LLM costs. Starting with just ~$4K, we burned through 30% of our budget in the first week with only $260 MRR. Our well-fundedcompetitors offered 5 free code gen requests daily (30/month), while we provided just 1 request/user lifetime. Talked to users, they wanted to explore platform for free but even with our minimal free tier, costs were eating up our savings. Traffic ... ... kept growing from our use case videos, engagement on Reddit/X and blogs. We approached VCs but got no replies. We pivoted to a paid-only model after burning 60% of our

... seed capital to start your business? I see mostly VC-funded companies on Product Hunt (mostly YC). But are there people who fund